Robert Novak and the Pedestrian

Robert Novak is getting quite the sympathetic response on the right for his hit and run this morning:

Karl at Protein Wisdom: 

Seems like someone might want to get those eyes checked.  It is a sad story, not only for the victim (who was treated at George Washington University Hospital for minor injuries), but also for Novak, who — for all of his rep as the “Prince of Darkness” and quips about running over pedestrians — is said to be one of the few Beltway pundits who is popular and well-liked in DC newsrooms.

Macsmind objects to Matt Yglesias’s objection to the trivialization of criminal behavior:

Commenting on Robert Novak’s minor run in with a pedestrian, Matthew Yglesias is mad, but I mean really?

“This isn’t the first time Novak’s gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor injuries, which means Novak will probably only see a minor penalty. And that’s too bad. The penalties for this stuff ought to be much stiffer. Morally speaking, what Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random. “He’s not dead, that’s the main thing,” says Novak but that’s just a coincidence.

I hate, incidentally, that coverage of this is using the euphemism that Novak is known as an “aggressive” driver. He’s a criminal. Cars are large, heavy, fast-moving objects that share space with delicate flesh-and-blood human beings — piloting them in an illegal manner is serious wrongdoing.

Typical liberal “Over-reactiviatas” we call it here. Some an old man hits a person with their car in the cross walk – regardless of the reason – and that equates him with a mass murderer?

I mean its not as if he left a secretary drowning in the river or some crazy thing like that.

Of course, the obligatory Chappaquiddick jab, and yes, of course: plowing your car into a river while drunk and then escaping while you leave your passenger to drown is orders of magnitude more heinous than plowing your car into a pedestrian while blind, splaying him across your windshield, and speeding off as he falls back into the street. I can see that, most definitely. Hit and run is so much less distasteful when the felon is a conservative Republican — and a popular, well-liked conservative Republican, too.

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